However, there is another reason to read this essay. Hardy gives a few examples of fields of math which are entirely useless. Number theory, he claims, has absolutely no applications. The study of non-euclidean geometry, he claims, has absolutely no applications. History has proven him dramatically wrong, “pure” math has a way of becoming indispensable

modern post-training uses RL and immense amounts of synthetic data to iteratively bootstrap better performance. if you squint this is extremely similar to the AlphaZero approach of iteratively training using RL over data generated through self-play

Your identity must be registered at plc.directory, the central service they control, which allows them to stop clients from being able to verify your identity. I think they intend on decentralizing this, eventually.

However, you are allowed to create an identity which only uses keys you control. You are also allowed to update an existing identity and transition it to only use keys you control: https://web.plc.directory/spec/v0.1/did-plc

There is no need to visit archive.org, the internet archive can directly seed the content it deems worthy of archival. Abstrusegoose.com eventually expires and the new owner points it to new content but the old site sticks around indefinitely, it is accessible via hash for as long as someone seeds it.

The treatment in thirty-three miniatures describes the steps you take but doesn't mention what you are actually doing (finding eigenvalues) or leave you with any intuition for why this was a natural thing to have tried

"proof of personhood" is something of a term of art which worldcoin did not invent. They are not literally claiming they can prove, in a mathematical sense, personhood. What would that even mean? See for example this, which seems to have originated the term in 2017: https://berkeley-defi.github.io/assets/material/Proof%20of%2...

"proof of personhood" was created in contrast to "proof of work" and "proof of stake". If you want to get technical "proof of work" is also not a mathematical proof, it is more of an argument of work, since it's possible to get lucky and find a low hash without doing all the work. The word "proof" is not doing what you think it is doing.

There are a couple other "proof of personhood" protocols and none of them mathematically prove personhood, because that is obviously impossible, some of them are listed at the beginning of this post: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2023/07/24/biometric.html

Just some simple examples:

> Imagine that your digital identity has been lost in some way — shut down by authorities for non-compliance, or otherwise blocked. With traditional cash — and other cryptocurrencies — you can always make a new wallet and stash some fresh coins in it. But this isn’t Minority Report, and you can’t get a new iris from your neighborhood surgeon.

You don't need to walk up to an Orb to create a wallet. You can own and transact worldcoin without ever showing your iris to an orb.

> When your immutable digital identity is locked — imagine merchants who won’t take your coins from you without a digital signature announcing your World ID — it’s over for you. No old account. No new account. No soup for you. You just lost your digital personhood.

This is also possible... with every other form of payment? Imagine merchants who refuse to accept cash. Once the government locks your credit card you're out of luck. Imagine a world where you have to sign in with google before you can pay for anything (why is the worldid dystoia apparently so easy to imagine, while the google one seems silly?). Once the government locks your google account you're out of luck. A dystopia has _many_ levers to pull and refusing to deploy worldcoin is not have any impact on the success of that dystopia.

There is really so much that it's not possible to clarify "exactly" what others aren't getting in a single comment, there are a dozen different misconceptions, if you have specific concerns I'm curious to hear them and attempt to reply to them.

Separately, I strongly suspect that your idea of worldcoin's "stated purpose" is not something they have ever stated.

TLS and other measures make me _very_ sure google.com is resolving to a server controlled by Google. A congress who wanted to do so could vote using hardware wallets and publish signatures and we could be just as sure that the blockchain reflected reality. A congress who wanted to do so [1] could declare that henceforth the answer on the blockchain _is_ reality; ryan air could decide that the ethereum smart contract which manages bookings _is_ reality, then there would be no oracle problem even by your definition.

[1] or maybe it would require a constitutional change

I'm not sure what you mean by buying biometrics early, stealing them seems very uneconomical, and faking them is an engineering challenge which seems quite difficult.

> And even worse, if you were once robbed of your biometrics in that system, you have lost it forever as I understand it? Is there even any way to get back what was robbed from you?

The biometric is only used for the airdrop. It is possible to create a wallet and send and receive transactions without ever visiting an orb. The only thing the biometric does is send an initial amount of WLD to your wallet and ensure that you can only receive that initial amount once.

If someone steals your wallet there is no getting it back, it is not linked to your identity it is just a private key. I'm not really sure what it means in this context to steal your biometrics?

> And just out of curiosity, does this system handle collisions of biometrics? Or is it just assuming and hopes for none to happen?

This is territory I don't know very well. I believe irises were chosen specifically because they were not invasive and they contain enough entropy that the chance of collisions is quite small. I don't know if it has enough entropy that they can be sure there are no collisions or if it has enough entropy that the expected number of collisions was tolerably low.

> What prevents a factory owner from having all of his employees grab an orb, scan their irises, claim their coin, and then hand over their wallets to him as a condition of employment?

The airdrop is gated in multiple places. Everybody needs to visit an orb to claim worldcoin but the set of active orbs is managed by worldcoin and when one of them acts suspiciously the orb can be deactivated, among other counter-measures. A set of wallets all owned by distinct people will act differently than a set of wallets controlled by one person.

This is obviously not perfect, some fraud will occur. It is still a more fair initial distribution than any other currency I know of.

Blockchains are like virtual computers. It is absolutely possible to imagine ryan air deploying a smart contract to ethereum and giving it sufficient authority to issue bookings but until that happens ethereum is next to useless for booking ryan air flights. This is the oracle problem.

Here I've focused on the write-path but "the oracle problem" usually refers to the read-path. Say you have some prediction market where participants can place bets on who the next US president will be. How do you resolve that market? When Congress certifies the election they do not publish that certification onto any blockchain. Maybe some day they will. But for now blockchains have to make do with various hacks which allow them to imperfectly track what is happening in the outside world.

The value of the biometric is in ensuring a ~ more fair ~ airdrop. With bitcoin the people who discovered it first and who were able to run miners received an outsized reward, and consequently the distribution of bitcoin is extremely unequal. The usage of biometrics doesn't _completely_ solve this problem, there is still a pool of insiders who have an outsized amount of wld, but a very large number of people will be able to walk up to an orb to claim some wld and they will all receive roughly equal amounts. The initial distribution of wld will be much more fair than the initial distribution of any other token or currency I know of. That is the value of the biometric.

There also don't appear to have been any spikes in atmospheric carbon dioxide during the relevant period: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth%27s_at...

Though maybe you were looking at a data source with better resolution?